The Shining

for halls)
He touched the key, let his fingers wander over it. His head felt dry and sick. He turned the key and the tumblers thumped back smoothly.
(OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD!)
(this game isn’t croquet though the mallets are too short this game is)
(WHACK-BOOM! Straight through the wicket.)
(OFF WITH HIS HEEEEEAAAAAAAD-)
Danny pushed the door open. It swung smoothly, without a creak. He was standing just outside a large combination bedsitting room, and although the snow had not reached up this far-the highest drifts were still a foot below the second-floor windows-the room was dark because Daddy had closed all the shutters on the western exposure two weeks ago.
He stood in the doorway, fumbled to his right, and found the switch plate. Two bulbs in an overhead cut-glass fixture came on. Danny stepped further in and looked around. The rug was deep and soft, a quiet rose color. Soothing. A double bed with a white coverlet. A writing desk
(Pray tell me: Why is a raven like a writing desk?)
by the large shuttered window. During the season the Constant Writer
(having a wonderful time, wish you were fear)
would have a pretty view of the mountains to describe to the folks back home.
He stepped further in. Nothing here, nothing at all. Only an empty room, cold because Daddy was heating the east wing today. A bureau. A closet, its door open to reveal a clutch of hotel hangers, the kind you can’t steal. A Gideon Bible on an endtable. To his left was the bathroom door, a full-length mirror on it reflecting his own white-faced image. That door was ajar and-
He watched his double nod slowly.
Yes, that’s where it was, whatever it was. In there. In the bathroom. His double walked forward, as if to escape the glass. It put its hand out, pressed it against his own. Then it fell away at an angle as the bathroom door swung open. He looked in.
A long room, old-fashioned, like a Pullman car. Tiny white hexagonal tiles on the floor. At the far end, a toilet with the lid up. At the right, a washbasin and another mirror above it, the kind that hides a medicine cabinet. To the left, a huge white tub on claw feet, the shower curtain pulled closed. Danny stepped into the bathroom and walked toward the tub dreamily, as if propelled from outside himself, as if this whole thing were one of the dreams Tony had brought him, that he would perhaps see something nice when he pulled the shower curtain back, something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy-
So he pulled the shower curtain back.
The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws.
Danny shrieked. But the sound never escaped his lips; turning inward and inward, it fell down in his darkness like a stone in a well. He took a single blundering step backward, bearing his heels clack on the white hexagonal tiles, and at the same moment his urine broke, spilling effortlessly out of him.
The woman was sitting up.
Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards. She was not breathing. She was a corpse, and dead long years.
Danny turned and ran. Bolting through the bathroom door, his eyes starting from their sockets, his hair on end like the hair of a hedgehog about to be turned into a sacrificial
(croquet? or rogue?)
ball, his mouth open and soundless. He ran full-tilt into the outside door of 217, which was now closed. He began hammering on it, far beyond realizing that it was unlocked, and he had only to turn the knob to let himself out. His mouth pealed forth deafening screams that were beyond human auditory range. He could only hammer on the door and hear the dead woman coming for him, bloated belly, dry hair, outstretched hands-something that had lain slain in that tub for perhaps years, embalmed there in magic.
The door would not open, would not, would not, would not.
And then the voice of Dick Hallorann came to him, so sudden and unexpected, so calm, that his locked vocal cords opened and he began to cry weakly-not with fear but with blessed relief.
(I don’t think they can hurt you… they’re like pictures in a book… close your eyes and they’ll he gone.)
His eyelids